Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games

I'm researching a larger post right now. While researching, the list of interesting tabs that I happen upon and save for later starts to pile up.

Here's a good one: Jose Pablo Zagal is a researcher in game studies at Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with some collaborators, he's written some fine articles, including this one: Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games (PDF). In order to study cooperative game play in MMOGs, they studied Knizia's Lord of the Rings board game.

One fun tip: most Google searches for this article will reveal it at the journal in which it was published. From that site, you can only view the article by paying $15.00 for a one day pass.

I did a little snooping around for the name of the authors and the name of the institution in which they studied in order to find their home pages / web sites. Wherein I discovered that the articles could be had for free. I suspect that this is true of many published scholarly articles: for pay from the publisher, but for free from the author.

Yehuda